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Are some deaths more important than others?

21Sep2011

Opening my Sunday comics this morning I see half are not-funny 9/11 memorials. Half of media commentary also seems on 9/11, and is largely uninformative.

In the decade since 9/11 over half a billion people have died worldwide. A great many choices could have delayed such deaths, including personal choices to smoke less or exercise more, and collective choices like allowing more immigration. And cryonics might have saved most of them.

Yet, to show solidarity with these three thousand victims, we have pissed away three trillion dollars ($1 billion per victim), and trashed long-standing legal principles. And now we’ll waste a day remembering them, instead of thinking seriously about how to save billions of others. I would rather we just forgot 9/11.

Do I sound insensitive? If so, good — 9/11 deaths were less than one part in a hundred thousand of deaths since then, and don’t deserve to be sensed much more than that fraction. If your feelings say otherwise, that just shows how full fricking far your mind has gone.

My reason for disagreeing about it is that it’s dumb. Why do you want to preserve yourself in a bath of liquid nitrogen for many years? Why put future people to that expense? It reeks of the very megalomania that this post ironically critiques. Are you really so indispensable that no one between now and the time that thawing you out becomes feasible will be at all comparable? Why not let the people of the future enjoy the future without interference from us? If they want to see what life was like now, the LoC preserved a billion tweets- let them go try to make sense of that. I see no reason to afflict the non-anthropologically inclined with the task of dragging some damaged corpse out into the light. What a curious obsession.

LN2 isn’t all that expensive, and on large scales it tends to be less so. As with any scale good, those who opt out of cryonics are driving up the cost (and reducing the quality) for those who do.

As to any one person’s self-perceived indispensibility or lack thereof, that utterly misses the point, which is that there are 100,000 people dying on a daily basis who could perhaps not be dying if cryonics were applied.

I understand the sentiment in this post, but I don’t agree. One thing I hate when discussing people’s feelings in response to hardship is to compare it to other people’s hardships. The idea that the 9/11 deaths represent a small fraction of overall deaths so they should be “sensed” as such is false; you know what doesn’t make me feel better about suffering? The fact that other people are suffer more in other places. That doesn’t make me “sense” 9/11 less, or want to. It’s like telling a solider who has PTSD from witnessing two murders that hey–you shouldn’t feel bad–another guy had his whole platoon gunned down! Emotional response is not relative (or if you want to get nerdy, it’s not linear in hardship).

The statement should be: recognize 9/11, and use those feelings to empathize and recognize _other_ suffering as well. More importantly: Do something about it.

P.S. For some reason this statement reminds me of hearing someone say, “Eat all the food on your plate because people in Somalia are starving.” Yeah, I’m sure they appreciate that.

I would say the statement reminds me more of hearing someone say: “You just spent a million dollars on jacuzzis for the low income people in your neighborhood, and you have never even heard of the famine in the Horn. Huh. “

I'm a Professor in the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. I use field work and statistics to study poverty, political engagement, the causes and consequences of violence, and policy in developing countries. [Read more]